Red Hat To Partners: Build Open-Source Practice Fit For Enterprise

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The 2015 Red Hat Partner Conference kicked off Wednesday with a focus on a number of the hottest emerging technologies hitting the enterprise market, and a call from the software vendor to partners to build practices around those open-source products.

Red Hat execs urged the 350 partners attending the summit in Orlando, Fla., to invest in delivering the cutting-edge cloud infrastructure, storage, development platforms and container technologies that business customers are clamoring for.

Red Hat has been busy developing enterprise-ready versions of those technologies, they said, from its OpenStack distribution, to the OpenShift PaaS offering, to deep support for Docker, the Linux container standard that's revolutionizing DevOps.

Red Hat is helping its channel take "these cool, sexy things that people are talking about" and sell them "with real products, with a real company behind them, all of the downstream lifecycle management and all of the things you would expect behind an enterprise-class product," Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst told CRN in an interview after delivering his keynote.

Whitehurst said what Red Hat does best -- and what serves as a powerful message for partners to take to customers -- is enabling enterprises to on-ramp those powerful open-source technologies with confidence.

The very nature of the open-source movement has drastically changed in the past five years, Whitehurst said. Once, it was about providing cheaper alternatives to proprietary solutions -- today, it's where all the innovation is happening.

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